The Cold War was a geopolitical chess match between the United States, the Soviet Union, and

both
parties’ allies in which the major power players sought to project their respective ideologies across the
globe in the wake of colonialism’s collapse following World War Two. The period occurred between
1947, the year of the Truman Doctrine, and 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Causes of the Cold War

What caused the Cold War? A number of geopolitical factors that emerged in the wake of the Second
World War, pitting Russia against the U.S. World War II ended with the Soviet Union and United States
as allies that triumphed over Nazi Germany. But how did two countries that used to fight on the same
side end up a couple of years later as mortal enemies in a Cold War of distrust that prevailed for years to
come?

Possible Causes for the Cold War

Although The U.S. and Soviet Union were allies during WWII, there were many tensions early on and
once the common threat of Germany and Japan were removed, it was only a matter of time for the
shaky relationship to fall apart. Here are some possible factors that contributed to the Cold War:

· The Soviet Union refused to become part of the UN for a long time

· Stalin felt that America and Britain were delaying D-Day, causing more Soviet losses in a plot to
weaken the Soviet army. Almost sixty times more Soviets died in the war than the Americans.

· The “Big Three” clashed during the Tehran Conference about Poland and other Eastern European
countries that bordered with Germany. Stalin felt independent countries were a security threat to
Russia because they have been weak enough to let Germany attack the Soviet Union through them
several times. Britain and America wanted these countries to be independent, not under communist
rule.
· The Soviets and Germans had a non-aggression pact in the first two years of the war with a secret
protocol

· The support of the Western allies of the Atlantic Charter

· The Eastern Bloc of Soviet satellite states that was created

· The Allies allowing Germany to rebuild an industry and army, scrapping the Marshall and
Morgenthau plans

· The Allies allowing Germany to join NATO

· American and British fears of communist attacks and the Soviet Union’s dislike of capitalism

· The Soviet Union’s fear of America’s nuclear weapons and refusal to share their nuclear secrets

· The Soviet Union’s actions in Eastern Germany, in the Soviet zone

· The USSR’s aim to promote communism across the world and their expansion into Eastern Europe

Policy of Containment: America’s Cold War Strategy

Shortly after Stalin’s death in March 1953, Eisenhower gave a speech notably titled “The Chance for
Peace,” in which he made clear that the United States and its friends had chosen one road while Soviet
leaders had chosen another path in the post-war world. But he always looked for ways to encourage the
Kremlin to move in a new direction. In a diary entry from January 1956, he summarized his national
security policy, which became known as the “New Look”: “We have tried to keep constantly before us
the purpose of promoting peace with accompanying step-by-step disarmament. As a preliminary, of
course, we have to induce the Soviets to agree to some form of inspection, in order that both sides may
be confident that treaties are being executed faithfully. In the meantime, and pending some advance in
this direction, we must stay strong, particularly in that type of power that the Russians are compelled to
respect.”

One of Eisenhower’s first acts upon taking office in January 1953 was to order a review of U.S. foreign
policy. He generally agreed with Truman’s policy of containment except for China, which he included in
his strategic considerations. Task forces studied and made recommendations regarding three possible
strategies:

1. A continuation of the policy of containment, the basic policy during the Truman years;

2. A policy of global deterrence, in which U.S. commitments would be expanded and communist
aggression forcibly met;

3. A policy of liberation which through political, economic, and paramilitary means would “roll back”
the communist empire and liberate the peoples behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains.

The latter two options were favoured by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who counselled the use
of the threat of nuclear weapons to counter Soviet military force. He argued that having resolved the
problem of military defence, the free world “could undertake what has been too long delayed—a
political offensive.”
Eisenhower rejected liberation as too aggressive and the policy of containment as he understood it as
too passive, selecting instead deterrence, with an emphasis on air and sea power. But he allowed Dulles
to convey an impression of “deterrence plus.” In January 1954, for example, Dulles proposed a new
American policy—“a maximum deterrent at a bearable cost,” in which “local defences must be
reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power.” The best way to deter aggression,
Dulles said, is for “the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with
means of its own choosing.”

As the defence analysts James Jay Carafano and Paul Rosenzweig have observed, Eisenhower built his
Cold War foreign policy, largely based on the policy of containment, on four pillars:

· Providing security through “a strong mix of both offensive and defensive means.”

· Maintaining a robust economy.

· Preserving a civil society that would “give the nation the will to persevere during the difficult days
of a long war.”

NSC-68: The Blueprint for Cold War Militarization

The prospect in 1950 of a united and expansionist communism, led by the Soviet Union and Communist
China, led the Truman administration to draft and adopt the most important national security document
of the Cold War— National Security Council Report 68.
In late January 1950, Truman requested an in-depth report on the continuing world crisis. Drafted by
Paul Nitze, who had replaced George Kennan as the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning
Staff, and a team of State and Defense Department officials, NSC-68 was submitted to the president in
April.

Truman was reacting to a series of aggressive communist actions, including the Soviet organization in
January 1949 of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), intended to strengthen the
USSR’s hold on Eastern Europe; the successful Soviet test in September of an atom bomb; the
establishment of the People’s Republic of China; the creation of the communist German Democratic
Republic (East Germany); and Mao’s public promise that China would side with the Soviet Union in the
event of a third world war.

Of special concern to the president was the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb, which the
administration had not expected until mid-1950 at the earliest. Truman quickly decided that the United
States should proceed with the development of a hydrogen bomb. He defined the key components of
American military strength as a modernized and trained conventional capacity and a nuclear edge over
the communists.

NSC-68 presented Truman with a comprehensive plan of action to meet the Soviet challenge. The plan
would serve as America’s core strategy until superseded by President Richard Nixon’s policy of détente
in the early 1970s.

The Warsaw Pact

The USSR and seven European countries signed the Warsaw Pact on May 14, 1955 as a response to
NATO, to have a similar alliance on the opposition side. Members included Albania, Czechoslovakia, East
Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and the Soviet Union. Through the treaty, member states promised
to defend any member that may be attacked by an outside force, with the unified command under a
leader of the Soviet Union. The Warsaw Pact ensured that most European nations were aligned in one of
two opposing camps and formalized the political divide in Europe that became prevalent World War II.
The Warsaw pact was only signed 6 years after the NATO alliance was made. The reason for this is
because NATO allowed West Germany to join the alliance and start a small army again. The Soviet
leaders were very apprehensive about this, especially with WWI and WWII still fresh in mind and
decided to get security measures in place in the shape of a political and military alliance. The pact
however only lasted until 1991, when the Soviet Union came to an end

Hungarian Revolution of 1956

Eisenhower was president at a time, said Congressman Walter Judd, when the world was “filled with
confusion,” when a third of its people had gained their independence, and a third had lost it. “No such
convulsions have ever previously occurred in all of human history.” Yet for the majority of Americans,
the Eisenhower years went by so calmly—at least until the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane
in 1960—that they did not realize what serious dangers had been overcome. Still, there was some
criticism of Eisenhower’s foreign policy, particularly the U.S. response to the failed Hungarian
Revolution.

On October 22, 1956, five thousand students crammed into a hall in Budapest and approved a
manifesto that, among other things, called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, free
elections, freedom of association, and economic reform. The following day, thousands filled the streets
of the capital city, chanting “Russians go home!” and ending up in Hero Square, where they pulled down
a giant statue of Stalin.

“In twelve brief days of euphoria and chaos,” writes the historian Anne Applebaum, “nearly every
symbol of the communist regime was attacked” and, in most cases, destroyed. Along with eight
thousand other political prisoners, Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty was released from the prison in which he
had been kept in solitary confinement. Hungarian soldiers deserted in droves and gave their weapons to
the revolutionaries. But then Soviet tanks and troops rolled back into the city in the first days of
November to crush the Hungarian Revolution, brutally crushing the revolution and killing an estimated
two thousand people. Nearly fifteen thousand were wounded. According to the authoritative Black Book
of Communism, thirty-five thousand people were arrested, twenty-two thousand jailed, and two
hundred executed. More than two hundred thousand Hungarians fled the country, many of them to
America.

Conservatives charged that the Eisenhower administration, after encouraging resistance if not
revolution, failed to help the Hungarian freedom fighters. In some of its broadcasts, Radio Free Europe,
financed by the U.S. government and run by Eastern European exiles, gave the impression that the West
might come to the Hungarians’ assistance. It didn’t. There were several reasons why America did not act
in Hungary:

· The United States asked Austria for freedom of passage to get to Hungary, but Vienna refused
transit by land or even use of its air space.

· The United States had no plan for dealing with any major uprising behind the Iron Curtain. No one
in authority apparently believed that something like the Hungarian Revolution might happen.

· The Soviets had the home-field advantage, and an American defeat would have been a serious
strategic defeat not only in Europe but around the world.

Outwardly unsuccessful, the Hungarian Revolution showed that communism in Eastern Europe was
weaker than anyone, including the communists, realized. An empire viewed by many in the West as
invincible was exposed as vulnerable.

The Bay of Pigs Invasion

In March, just two months into the Kennedy administration, Air Force Chief Curtis LeMay was called into
a meeting at the Pentagon with the Joint Chiefs. He would represent the Air Force because White was
out of town. LeMay noticed that there was something odd about the meeting right from the start. To
begin with, there was a civilian in the room who pushed aside a curtain to reveal landing areas for a
military engagement on the coast of Cuba. LeMay had been told absolutely nothing about the operation
until that moment. All eyes turned to him when the civilian, who worked for the CIA, asked which of the
three sites would provide the best landing area for planes.

LeMay explained that he was completely in the dark and needed more information before he would
hazard a guess. He asked how many troops would be involved in the landing. The answer, that there
would be 700, dumbfounded him. There was no way, he told them, that an operation would succeed
with so few troops. The briefer cut him short. “That doesn’t concern you,” he told LeMay.

Over the next month, LeMay tried unsuccessfully to get information about the impending invasion. Then
on April 16 he stood in for White—again out of town—at another meeting. Just one day before the
planned invasion, he finally learned some of the basics of the plan. The operation, which would become
known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, had been conceived during the Eisenhower administration by the CIA
as a way to depose Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Cuban exiles had been trained as an invasion force by
the CIA and former U.S. military personnel. The exiles would land in Cuba with the aid of old World War
II bombers with Cuban markings and try to instigate a counterrevolution. It was an intricate plan that
depended on every phase working perfectly.

THE BAY OF PIGS INVASION: A FAILURE OF MILITARY STRATEGY

LeMay saw immediately that the invasion force would need the air cover of U.S. planes, but the
Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, under Kennedy’s order, had cancelled that the night before. LeMay saw
the plan was destined to fail, and he wanted to express his concern to Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara. But the Secretary of Defense was not present at the meeting.

Instead, LeMay was able to speak only to the Under Secretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatric. LeMay did
not mince words.

“You just cut the throats of everybody on the beach down there,” LeMay told Gilpatric.
“What do you mean?” Gilpatric asked.

LeMay explained that without air support, the landing forces were doomed. Gilpatric responded with a
shrug.

The entire operation went against everything LeMay had learned in his thirty-three years of experience.
In any military operation, especially one of this significance, a plan cannot depend on every step going
right. Most steps do not go right and a great deal of padding must be built in to compensate for those
unforeseen problems. It went back to the LeMay doctrine—hitting an enemy with everything you had at
your disposal if you have already come to the conclusion that a military engagement is your only option.
Use everything, so there is no chance of failure. Limited, half-hearted endeavors are doomed.

The Bay of Pigs invasion turned out to be a disaster for the Kennedy administration. Kennedy realized it
too late. The Cubans did not rise up against Castro, and the small, CIA-trained army was quickly defeated
by Castro’s forces. The men were either killed or taken prisoner. All of this made Kennedy look weak and
inexperienced. A short time later, Kennedy went out to a golf course with his old friend, Charles Bartlett,
a journalist. Bartlett remembered Kennedy driving golf balls far into a distant field with unusual anger
and frustration, saying over and over, “I can’t believe they talked me into this.” The entire episode
undermined the administration and set the stage for a difficult summit meeting between Kennedy and
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev two months later. It also exacerbated the administration’s rocky
relationship with the Joint Chiefs, who felt the military was unfairly blamed for the fiasco in Cuba.

This was not quite true. Kennedy put the blame squarely on the CIA and on himself for going along with
the ill-conceived plan. One of his first steps following the debacle was to replace the CIA director, Allen
Dulles, with John McCone. The incident forced Kennedy to grow in office. Although his relationship with
the military did suffer, the problems between Kennedy and the Pentagon predated the Bay of Pigs
Invasion. According to his chief aid and speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, Kennedy was unawed by Generals.
“First, during his own military service, he found that military brass was not as wise and efficient as the
brass on their uniform indicated . . . and when he was president with a great background in foreign
affairs, he was not that impressed with the advice he received.”

LeMay and the other Chiefs sensed this and felt that Kennedy and the people under him simply ignored
the military’s advice on the Bay of Pigs Invasion. LeMay was especially incensed when McNamara
brought in a group of brilliant, young statisticians as an additional civilian buffer between the ranks of
professional military advisers and the White House. They became known as the Defense Intellectuals.
LeMay used the more derogatory term “Whiz Kids.” These were people who had either no military
experience on the ground whatsoever or, at the most, two or three years in lower ranks.

In LeMay’s mind, this limited background could never match the combined experience that the Joint
Chiefs brought to the table. These young men, who seemed to have the President’s ear, also exuded a
sureness of their opinions that LeMay saw as arrogance. This ran against his personality—as LeMay
approached almost everything in his life with a feeling of self-doubt, he was actually surprised when
things worked out well. Here he saw the opposite—inexperienced people coming in absolutely sure of
themselves and ultimately making the wrong decisions with terrible consequences.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

On 14th October 1962 a US spy plane flying over Cuba reported the installation of Russian nuclear
missile bases. The picture (left) is one of those taken from the spy plane and clearly shows missile
transporter trailers and tents where fuelling and maintenance took place.

The nuclear arms race was a part of the Cold War between America and the USSR which had begun soon
after the end of the second world War. In 1962 Russian missiles were inferior to American missiles and
had a limited range. This meant that American missiles could be fired on Russia but Russian missiles
could only be fired on Europe. Stationing missiles on Cuba (the only western communist country) meant
that Russian missiles could now be fired on America.

The Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, welcomed the Russian deployment since it would offer additional
protection against any American invasion like the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

On hearing of the Russian deployment on 16th October, US president J F Kennedy called a meeting of
the EXCOMM (Executive Committee of the National Security Council) to discuss what action should be
taken. The group remained on alert and met continuously but were split between those who wanted to
take military action and those that wanted a diplomatic solution.

On October 22nd Kennedy made the news of the installations public and announced that he would place
a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent Russian missiles from reaching the bases. However, despite
the blockade, Russian ships carrying the missiles remained on track for Cuba.

On October 26th the EXCOMM received a letter from Russian leader Nikita Kruschev stating that he
would agree to remove the weapons if America would guarantee not to invade Cuba. The following day
a US spy plane was shot down over Cuba and EXCOMM received a second letter from Kruschev stating
that the missiles would be removed from Cuba if America removed nuclear weapons from Turkey.
Although Kennedy was not averse to removing the missiles from Turkey, he did not want to be seen to
giving in to Kruschev’s demands. Additionally, the second letter which was much more demanding and
aggressive in tone did not offer a solution to end the conflict.

Attorney General, Robert Kennedy suggested that the best solution was for the second letter be ignored
and that the US reply to Kruschev accepting the terms of the first letter. A letter was duly drafted and
sent. Additionally, the Russian Ambassador was told ‘off the record’ that the missiles would be removed
from Turkey in a few months when the crisis had died down. It was emphasised that this ‘secret clause’
should not be made public.

On Sunday 28th October Kruschev called a meeting of his advisors. The Russians were aware that
President Kennedy was scheduled to address the American people at 5pm that day. Fearing that it could
be an announcement of war Kruschev decided to agree to the terms and rushed a response to reach the
President before 5pm. The crisis was over. The Russians duly removed their bases from Cuba and as
agreed US missiles were quietly removed from Turkey some months later.
Result of the Cuban Missile Crisis

In the summer of 1962, negotiations on a treaty to ban above ground nuclear testing dominated the
political world. The treaty involved seventeen countries, but the two main players were the United
States and the Soviet Union. Throughout the 1950s, with the megaton load of nuclear bombs growing,
nuclear fallout from tests had become a health hazard, and by the 1960s, it was enough to worry
scientists. Kennedy, in particular, was pushing for a ban and was optimistic about succeeding.

It never happened. The result of the Cuban Missile Crisis was an increasing build-up of nuclear weapons
that continued until the end of the Cold War.

Air Force General Curtis LeMay was less sanguine because the U.S. had already been limiting its above
ground tests while the Soviets had been increasing their own. Just eight months earlier, on October 31,
1961, the Soviets tested the fifty megaton “Tsar” Bomb, the largest nuclear device to date ever exploded
in the atmosphere (the test took place in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the far reaches of the Arctic
Ocean and was originally designed as a 100 megaton bomb, but even the Soviets cut the yield in half
because of their own fears of fallout reaching its population). LeMay did not see any military advantage
for the U.S. to sign such a treaty. He doubted the countries would come to an agreement and felt
vindicated when the talks deadlocked by the end of the summer. The agreement was ultimately signed
the following spring, though, and remains one of the crowning achievements of the Kennedy
Administration.

Completely unnoticed that summer was the sailing of Soviet cargo ships bound for Cuba. Shipping
between Cuba and the USSR was not unusual since Cuba had quickly become a Soviet client state. With
the U.S. embargo restricting Cuba’s trade, the Soviets were propping up the island with technical
assistance, machinery, and grain, while Cuba reciprocated in a limited way with return shipments of
sugar and produce. But these particular ships were part of a larger military endeavour that would bring
the two powers to the most frightening standoff of the Cold War.
Sailing under false manifest, these cargo ships were secretly bringing Soviet-made, medium range
ballistic missiles to be deployed in Cuba. Once operational, these highly accurate missiles would be
capable of striking as far north as Washington, D.C. An army of over 40,000 technicians sailed as well.
Because the Soviets did not want their plan to be detected by American surveillance planes, the human
cargo was forced to stay beneath the deck during the heat of the day. They were allowed to come
topside only at night, and for a short time. The ocean crossing, which lasted over a month, was
horrendous for the Soviet advisers.

The first unmistakable evidence of the Soviet missiles came from a U-2 reconnaissance flight over the
island on October 14, 1962, that showed the first of twenty-four launching pads being constructed to
accommodate forty-two R-12 medium range missiles that had the potential to deliver forty-five nuclear
warheads almost anywhere in the eastern half of the United States.

Kennedy suddenly saw that he had been deceived by Krushchev and convened a war cabinet called
ExCom (Executive Committee of the National Security Council), which included the Secretaries of State
and Defense (Rusk and McNamara), as well as his closest advisers. At the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs
began planning for an immediate air assault, followed by a full invasion. Kennedy wanted everything
done secretly. He had been caught short, but he did not want the Russians to know that he knew their
plan until he had decided his own response and could announce it to the world.

Kennedy shared his decision to pursue negotiation and a naval blockade of Cuba while keeping the
option of an all-out invasion on the table with the Joint Chiefs on Friday, October 19. The heads of the
military, General Earle Wheeler of the Army, Admiral George Anderson of the Navy, General David
Shoup of the Marines, and LeMay of the Air Force, along with the head of the Joint Chiefs, Maxwell
Taylor, saw the blockade as ineffective and in danger of making the U.S. look weak. As Taylor told the
president, “If we don’t respond here in Cuba, we think the credibility (of the U.S.) is sacrificed.”

Of all the Chiefs, Kennedy and his team saw LeMay as the most intractable. But that impression may
have come from his demeanor, his candor, and perhaps his facial expressions, since he was not the most
belligerent of the Chiefs. Shoup was crude and angry at times. Admiral Anderson was equally vociferous
and would have the worst run-in with civilian leadership when he told McNamara directly that he did
not need the Defense Secretary’s advice on how to run a blockade. McNamara responded, “I don’t give
a damn what John Paul Jones would have done, I want to know what you are going to do—now!” On his
way out, McNamara told a deputy, “That’s the end of Anderson.” And in fact, Admiral Anderson became
Ambassador Anderson to Portugal a short time later.

LeMay differed from Kennedy and McNamara on the basic concept of nuclear weapons. Back on Tinian,
LeMay thought the use of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, although certainly larger than all other
weapons used, were really not all that different from other bombs. He based this on the fact that many
more people were killed in his first incendiary raid on Tokyo five months earlier than with either atomic
bomb. “The assumption seems to be that it is much more wicked to kill people with a nuclear bomb,
than to kill people by busting their heads with rocks,” he wrote in his memoir. But McNamara and
Kennedy realized that there was a world of difference between two bombs in the hands of one nation in
1945 and the growing arsenals of several nations in 1962.

Upon entering office and taking responsibility for the nuclear decision during the most dangerous period
of the Cold War, Kennedy came to loathe the destructive possibilities of this type of warfare. McNamara
would sway both ways during the Cuban Missile Crisis, making sure that the military option was always
there and available, but also trying to help the President find a negotiated way out. His proportional
response strategy that would come into play in Vietnam in the Johnson Administration three years later
was born in the reality of the dangers that came out of the Cuban crisis. “LeMay would have invaded
Cuba and had it out . . . but with nuclear weapons, you can’t have a limited war,” McNamara
remembered. “It’s completely unacceptable . . . with even just a few nuclear weapons getting through . .
. it’s crazy.”
POLITICAL RESULT OF THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

Finally, Nikita Krushchev, who created the crisis, brought it to an end by backing down and agreeing to
remove the weapons. As a political officer in the Red Army during the worst of World War II, at the siege
of Stalingrad, the Soviet leader understood what could happen if things got out of hand. As his son,
Sergei Krushchev, remembered his father saying, “Once you begin shooting, you can’t stop.”

In an effort to help him save face, Kennedy made it clear to everyone around him that there would be
no gloating over this victory. Castro, on the other hand was quite different in his response. When he
learned that the missiles were being packed up, Castro let loose with a tirade of cursing at Krushchev’s
betrayal. “He went on cursing, beating even his own record for curses,” recalled his journalist friend,
Carlos Franqui.

There was also a feeling of let-down among the Joint Chiefs. They thought the U.S. had capitulated and,
in the end, looked weak. They also did not trust the Russians to stand by their promise to dismantle and
take home all the missiles. The Soviets had a long track record of breaking most of their previous
agreements. LeMay considered the final negotiated settlement the greatest appeasement since Munich.
By breaking his word to Kennedy and placing missiles in the western hemisphere, Krushchev secured the
ceremonial removal of the United States’ antiquated medium range missiles from Turkey in exchange
for retrieving the missiles in Cuba. It was a hollow gesture as they were scheduled to be removed
already, but it allowed Krushchev to save face internationally. Castro continued to be a thorn in the side
of the United States. But ultimately, he was mostly inconsequential. More than four decades later,
Kennedy’s blockade and negotiated settlement stand as the best-case scenario.

Carter Foreign Policy of the 1970s

The Carter Foreign Policy has been summarized by some analysts as good intentions gone wrong. Carter
thought that most of the world’s problems flowed from the often antagonistic relationship between the
developed North and the undeveloped South—often called the Third World. So he set about eliminating
the causes of conflict. He negotiated a treaty turning over the Panama Canal to Panamanian control by
the end of the century. He cut off U.S. support of the authoritarian Somoza regime in Nicaragua,
enabling the Cuban-backed Sandinistas to overthrow Somoza and gain control of the government.

The Carter Foreign Policy’s Effect on the Cold War

As part of its human rights campaign, the Carter administration advised the Iranian military not to
suppress accelerating pro-Islamic demonstrations and riots. The shah of Iran, the chief U.S. ally in the
region, was soon in exile. Encouraged by the Ayatollah Khomeini, the de facto leader of the country,
militant Iranians paraded through the streets calling America the “great Satan.” They seized the U.S.
embassy in Teheran and held fifty-two Americans as hostages for fourteen and a half months.

Carter made the mistake of admitting publicly that he felt the same helplessness that a powerful person
feels when his child is kidnapped. As the political scientist Michael Kort points out, the admission made
the United States look like “a weak and helpless giant as the Iranians mistreated the hostages and
taunted the president.” A failed rescue attempt in April 1980 only made the United States and the
president look weaker. Not until the eve of Carter’s leaving office in January 1980 (after having been
defeated for reelection) did Iran release the hostages. “By then,” writes Kort, “Carter’s foreign policy
and his presidency lay in ruins.”

The renowned scholar of foreign affairs Jeane Kirkpatrick (later the U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations under Reagan) thought that Carter’s pivotal mistake was his failure to distinguish between the
relative danger of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. Carter did not perceive that the shah of Iran
and Nicaragua’s Somoza were less dangerous to U.S. interests than the fundamentalist Muslim and
Marxist regimes that replaced them. In her definitive 1979 essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,”
Kirkpatrick wrote:

The foreign policy of the Carter administration failed not for lack of good intentions but for lack of
realism about the nature of traditional versus revolutionary autocracies and the relation of each to the
American national interest. . . . [T] raditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than
revolutionary autocracies, are more susceptible of liberalization, and they are more compatible with U.S.
interests.

Beyond “reasonable” doubt, she wrote, the communist governments of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos
were much more repressive that those of “despised previous rulers.” The government of the People’s
Republic of China was more repressive than that of Taiwan; North Korea was more repressive than
South Korea. “Traditional autocrats,” she wrote, “tolerate social inequities, brutality, and poverty,
whereas revolutionary autocracies create them.”

President Carter’s single major accomplishment in foreign policy came in 1978 when he brought Prime
Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt to the United States to
negotiate and sign the Camp David Accords, which established peace between two old enemies and
marked a significant shift in Arab resistance to Israel’s right to exist. They were an historic achievement
but had little impact on the Cold War.

Reagan Doctrine — A Proactive Anti-USSR Policy

Ronald Reagan would permanently change the global picture, which looked bleak when he took office in
1981. From martial law in Poland imposed by the communist regime and the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan to the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and communist rule in Mozambique and Angola,
Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev claimed victories for Marxism-Leninism. Within a few years he
developed the “Reagan Doctrine,” a pro-active foreign policy.
Within the free world, the Atlantic alliance was strained. To counter the deployment in the late 1970s of
Soviet SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear missiles aimed at major European cities, NATO proposed a
dual-track approach—negotiations to remove the missiles and the deployment of U.S. Pershing II and
cruise missiles aimed at Soviet cities. The latter sparked a popular movement in Western Europe, aided
and abetted by the Kremlin, to freeze NATO’s deployment of nuclear weapons, and Western European
governments wavered in their resolve to counter the Soviets, even on their own soil.

Reagan put the deployment of the Euromissiles at the center of his new foreign policy. He forged a close
friendship with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and sought the support of other Western
European leaders, particularly Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany.

Unlike the foreign policy realists who viewed all regimes through the same lens, Reagan placed regime
differences at the heart of his understanding of the Cold War. With his modest Illinois roots and biblical
Christian faith learned from his mother, he emerged as a screen star and a committed anticommunist,
fighting communist efforts to take over the Hollywood trade unions in the postwar period. Poor eyesight
kept him stateside with the army during World War II, but his varied experiences contributed to his
appreciation of the need for military strength. Two terms as a Republican governor of California
confirmed his conservative, pro-freedom political views.

Reagan considered communism to be a disease and regarded the Soviet government as illegitimate. Like
Truman, he believed Soviet foreign policy to be offensive by its very nature, and he saw the world as
engaged in an ideological struggle between communism and liberal democracy. But unlike Truman, he
sought in the circumstances of the 1980s not merely to contain the USSR but to defeat it.
Reagan had endorsed the strategy and insights of NSC 68 shortly after that key document of the Truman
administration was declassified and published in 1975, devoting several of his radio commentaries to it.
Also in the 1970s, he called for reductions, not limitations, in U.S. and Soviet armaments through
verifiable agreements.

He identified as central weaknesses of the Soviet bloc the denial of religious freedom and the inability to
provide consumer goods. He stressed that Pope John Paul II’s trip to Poland in 1979 revealed that
communist atheism— ruthlessly imposed for decades—had failed to stop the people from believing in
God. Reagan noted the pope’s language—“Do not be afraid!”—and the size of the crowds at the masses
that he celebrated in Krakow, Warsaw, and other Polish cities. In Krakow, the pope’s home city,
between two and three million people welcomed him, the largest public gathering in the nation’s
history.

In a 1979 radio commentary, Reagan remarked that the pope, in his final public appearance, had invited
the people to bring forward several large crosses for his blessing. Suddenly there was movement among
the multitude of young people before him. They began raising thousands and thousands of crosses,
many of them homemade, for the pope’s blessing. “These young people of Poland,” Reagan said, “had
been born and raised and spent their entire lives under communist atheism. Try to make a Polish joke
out of that.”1

All these policy positions formed a main theme of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign: real peace
would come through the military strength of the West along with its political and economic freedom.
For Reagan, as for Truman, the gravest threat to the United States and the free world came from the
Soviet Union, whose continuing imperialist designs on every continent demanded a new Cold War
strategy.

Year of Miracles: Freedom Floods Eastern Europe

In February 1989, Václav Havel was jailed in Prague for participating in human rights protests, but the
protests continued. After months of strikes, roundtable talks began in Poland between leaders of the
still-outlawed Solidarity union and the communist government. The Polish government had insisted that
Solidarity was a “spent force,” but as the Polish economy worsened, it was forced to “reckon with ideas
they could not squelch and men they could not subdue.” In March, seventy-five thousand people
demonstrated in Budapest on the anniversary of the 1848 revolution, demanding the withdrawal of
Soviet troops and free elections.

What would follow was a domino-like collapse of socialism throughout Eastern Europe and, eventually,
Russia itself. The pivotal year of 1989 was later dubbed the Year of Miracles.

In April, Solidarity and the Polish government agreed to the first open elections since World War II. In
May, the Hungarian government started to dismantle the Iron Curtain along its border with Austria,
allowing East Germans to cross over into West Germany. Thousands did.

In June 1989, the Polish Solidarity movement won an overwhelming victory over their communist
opponents in the Soviet bloc’s first free elections in forty years. The same month, Imre Nagy, who had
led the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination, was given a hero’s burial in Budapest.
Gorbachev reminded the Council of Europe in July that he rejected the Brezhnev Doctrine: “Any
interference in domestic affairs and any attempts to restrict the sovereignty of states, both friend and
allies or any others, are inadmissible.”

In October hundreds of thousands of people began demonstrating every Monday evening in East
Germany, leading to the forced resignation of Communist Party boss Erich Honecker, who had boasted
in January that the Berlin Wall would stand for another hundred years. On November 9, 1989, a tidal
wave of East Germans poured across the West Berlin border when travel restrictions were lifted, and
the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.
The year of counterrevolutions ended with the overthrow and execution of the despot Nicolae
Ceausescu in Romania and the election of Václav Havel as the president of Czechoslovakia’s first non-
communist government since the 1948 coup engineered by Moscow.

The waves of liberty, however, did not reach the shores of China. In the spring of 1989, pro-democracy
Chinese students, inspired in part by the events in Eastern Europe, were demonstrating by the many
thousands in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing. For a short while, it seemed to Western
observers as if the leaders of Communist China might follow Gorbachev’s example and allow meaningful
political as well as economic liberalization. They underestimated the willingness of Deng Xiaoping and
other communist leaders to use maximum force to eliminate any threat to their political control. On
June 4, 1989, just two weeks after Gorbachev had visited China for a “socialist summit” with Deng,
Chinese troops and tanks ruthlessly crushed the protests in Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds and
perhaps thousands of defenceless students.

As China’s “paramount” leader, Deng had taken the measure of Mao and announced that he was right
70 percent of the time and wrong 30 percent of the time. The Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap
Forward were among the mistakes, but among the things Mao had done right were making China once
again a great power, maintaining the political monopoly of the Communist Party, and opening relations
with the United States as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. The most important of these was the
unchallenged political authority of the Party.

Deng’s most significant action, beginning in 1979, was to leaven China’s command economy with free-
market reforms, transforming the country into a global economic power in less than two decades.

German Reunification: A Return to One Germany

In late November 1989, without consulting any allies, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl suddenly
announced a ten-point program calling for free elections in East Germany and the eventual “German
reunification within a “Pan-European framework.” President Bush immediately endorsed the plan and
pressed Kohl to accept NATO membership for a reunified Germany, arguing that deeper European
integration was essential for the West’s acceptance of reunification.

When Britain and France as well as the Soviet Union expressed serious reservations about a united
Germany, the U.S. State Department suggested a “2 + 4” solution— the two Germanys would negotiate
the particulars of German reunification while the four occupying powers—Britain, France, the United
States, and the USSR—would work out the international details. Bush facilitated Soviet acceptance of
the controversial plan (Politburo hard-liners constantly referred to the twenty million Russians who had
died at German hands in World War II) with a grain and trade agreement and a commitment to speed up
arms control negotiations. In turn, the West German government made substantial economic
concessions of many billions of dollars to the Soviets.

In amazingly short order, and due in large part to the skilful diplomacy of the United States, the Treaty
on German Unity was signed by representatives of East and West Germany on August 31, 1990, and
approved by both legislatures the following month. Final approval was given by the four Allied powers
on October 2. Forty-five years after the end of World War II and forty-one years after Germany’s
division, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, and the country was reunited.

After less than a year of negotiations, Bush writes, “we had accomplished the most profound change in
European politics and security for many years, without confrontation, without a shot fired, and with all
Europe still on the best and most peaceful of terms.” “For me,” says Scowcroft, “the Cold War ended
when the Soviets accepted a united Germany in NATO.”
Fall of the Soviet Union: The Cold War Ends

The fall of the Soviet Union was a decades-in-the-making outcome of Cold War politics, but it happened
quite suddenly in the late 80s and early 90s, primarily at the level of U.S.-USSR politics. Even then the
end was not clear. The first of the three Bush-Gorbachev summit meetings did not take place until
December 1989 in Malta, where Bush emphasized the need for “superpower cooperation,” choosing to
overlook that the Soviet Union was no longer a superpower by any reasonable criterion and that
Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe was headed for Reagan’s “ash-heap of history.”

The second summit was in May 1990 in Washington, D.C., where the emphasis was on economics.
Gorbachev arrived in a sombre mood, conscious that his country’s economy was nearing free fall and
nationalist pressures were splitting the Soviet Union. Although a virtual pariah at home, the Soviet
leader was greeted by large, friendly American crowds. Bush tried to help, granting most-favoured-
nation trading status to the Soviet Union. Gorbachev appealed to American businessmen to start new
enterprises in the USSR, but what could Soviet citizens afford to buy? In Moscow the bread lines
stretched around the block. A month later, NATO issued a sweeping statement called the London
Declaration, proclaiming that the Cold War was over and that Europe had entered a “new, promising
era.” But the Soviet Union, although teetering, still stood.

The Fall of the Soviet Union Accelerates

The shrinking Soviet Union received another major blow when the biggest republic, Russia, elected its
own president, Boris Yeltsin. A former Politburo member turned militant anti-Communist, Yeltsin
announced his intention to abolish the Communist Party, dismantle the Soviet Union, and declare Russia
to be “an independent democratic capitalist state.”
For the remaining Stalinists in the Politburo, this was the final unacceptable act. Barely three weeks after
the Bush-Gorbachev summit in Moscow, the head of the KGB, the Soviet defence and interior ministers,
and other hard-liners—the so-called “Gang of Eight”—launched a coup. They placed Gorbachev under
house arrest while he was vacationing in the Crimea, proclaiming a state of emergency and themselves
the new leaders of the Soviet Union. They called in tanks and troops from outlying areas and ordered
them to surround the Russian Parliament, where Yeltsin had his office.

Some eight decades earlier, Lenin had stood on a tank to announce the coming of Soviet communism.
Now Yeltsin proclaimed its end by climbing onto a tank outside the Parliament and declaring that the
coup was “unconstitutional.” He urged all Russians to follow the law of the legitimate government of
Russia. Within minutes, the Russian defence minister stated that “not a hand will be raised against the
people or the duly elected president of Russia.” A Russian officer responded, “We are not going to shoot
the president of Russia.”

The image of Yeltsin boldly confronting the Gang of Eight was flashed around the world by the Western
television networks, especially America’s CNN, none of whose telecasts were blocked by the coup
plotters. The pictures convinced President Bush (on vacation in Maine) and other Western leaders to
condemn the coup and praise Yeltsin and other resistance leaders.

The attempted coup, dubbed the “vodka putsch” because of the inebriated behaviour of a coup leader
at a televised news conference, collapsed after three short days. When Gorbachev returned to Moscow,
he found that Boris Yeltsin was in charge. Most of the organs of power of the Soviet Union had
effectively ceased to exist or had been transferred to the Russian government. Gorbachev tried to act as
if nothing had changed, announcing, for example, that there was a need to “renew” the Communist
Party. He was ignored. The people clearly wanted an end to the party and him. He was the first Soviet
leader to be derided at the annual May Day parade, when protestors atop Lenin’s tomb in Red Square
displayed banners reading, “Down with Gorbachev! Down with Socialism and the fascist Red Empire.
Down with Lenin’s party.”
A supremely confident Yeltsin banned the Communist Party and transferred all Soviet agencies to the
control of the Russian republic. The Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia declared their
independence. As the historian William H. Chafe writes, the Soviet Union itself had fallen “victim to the
same forces of nationalism, democracy, and anti-authoritarianism that had engulfed the rest of the
Soviet empire.”

President Bush at last accepted the inevitable—the unravelling of the Soviet Union. At a cabinet meeting
on September 4, he announced that the Soviets and all the republics would and should define their own
future “and that we ought to resist the temptation to react to or comment on each development.”
Clearly, he said, “the momentum [is] toward greater freedom.” The last thing the United States should
do, he said, is to make some statement or demand that would “galvanize opposition . . . among the
Soviet hard-liners.” However, opposition to the new non-communist Russia was thin or scattered; most
of the hard-liners were either in jail or exile.

On December 12, Secretary of State James Baker, borrowing liberally from the rhetoric of President
Reagan, delivered an address titled “America and the Collapse of the Soviet Empire.” “The state that
Lenin founded and Stalin built,” Baker said, “held within itself the seeds of its demise… As a
consequence of Soviet collapse, we live in a new world. We must take advantage of this new Russian
Revolution.” While Baker praised Gorbachev for helping to make the transformation possible, he made
it clear that the United States believed his time had passed. President Bush quickly sought to make
Yeltsin an ally, beginning with the coalition he formed to conduct the Gulf War.

Gorbachev’s Role in the Fall of the Soviet Union

A despondent Gorbachev, not quite sure why it had all happened so quickly, officially resigned as
president of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991—seventy-four years after the Bolshevik
Revolution. Casting about for reasons, he spoke of a “totalitarian system” that prevented the Soviet
Union from becoming “a prosperous and well-to-do country,” without acknowledging the role of Lenin,
Stalin, and other communist dictators in creating and sustaining that totalitarian system. He referred to
“the mad militarization” that had crippled “our economy, public attitudes and morals” but accepted no
blame for himself or the generals who had spent up to 40 percent of the Soviet budget on the military.
He said that “an end has been put to the cold war” but admitted no role for any Western leader in
ending the war.

After just six years, the unelected president of a non-existent country stepped down, still in denial. That
night, the hammer and sickle came down from atop the Kremlin, replaced by the blue, white, and red
flag of Russia. It is an irony of history, notes Adam Ulam, that “the claim of Communism being a force for
peace among nations should finally be laid to rest in its birthplace.” Looking back at America’s longest
war and the fall of the Soviet Union, Martin Malia writes, “The Cold War did not end because the
contestants reached an agreement; it ended because the Soviet Union disappeared.”

When Gorbachev reached for the pen to sign the document officially terminating the USSR, he
discovered it had no ink. He had to borrow a pen from the CNN television crew covering the event. It
was a fitting end for someone who was never a leader like Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan, who had
clear goals and the strategies to reach them. Gorbachev’s attempt to do too much too quickly, the
historians Edward Judge and John Langdon conclude, “coupled with his underestimation of the potency
of the appeal of nationalism, split the Communist party and wrecked the Soviet Union.”

Gorbachev experimented, wavered, and at last wearily accepted the dissolution of one of the bloodiest
regimes in history. He deserves credit (if not the Nobel Peace Prize) for recognizing that brute force
would not save socialism in the Soviet Union or its satellites or prevent the fall of the Soviet Union.